Friends for Keeps

Staying connected to your past can make you happier here and now

In my thinking about happiness, I've come to realize that staying connected to people from my past is an important happiness booster — and I've also realized that I do a fairly bad job of it. In each stage of life, I've had great friends and great experiences, but when I've moved to the next stage, I've found it difficult to stay connected to those people.

Keeping these ties strong matters to happiness because, as research shows, a great way to boost happiness in the present is to remember happy times from the past. That's why photographs, scrapbooks, souvenirs, home movies, and other memory prompts are so precious and so worth the effort, despite our time-crunched days.

In particular, it's valuable to keep relationships strong. Ancient philosophers and contemporary researchers agree: A key to happiness is strong ties to other people. We need intimate, long-term relationships; we need to belong; we need to give and receive support (perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that giving support is just as important to happiness as getting support). Studies suggest that if you have five or more friends with whom to discuss an important matter, you're far more likely to describe yourself as "very happy."

But the tumult of everyday life — with its whirlwind of everything from carpool, nap schedules, and clogged toilets to graduations, new jobs, and moves to different cities — makes it challenging to maintain those connections over time. And while new friendships that reflect our current circumstances are important, old friends are important, too.

For instance, no matter how close I feel to my friends here in New York City, I feel a connection to my childhood friends that can never be replaced. We know one another's families; we slept over in one another's basements; we remember the teachers, the birthday parties, the pets, and all those little details from the deep past. As my daughter sang in preschool, "Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold." I feel a similar passion for my college friends. College is such an intense time of life; I feel connected to those people in a unique way.

But even though I recognize the importance of these relationships, I haven't been good at keeping them strong. To get some ideas about how I might do a better job, I consulted my sister — or, as I call her, "my sister the sage." Although she's five years younger than I am, my sister has always had a powerful influence on me, and I've always admired her outstanding ability to stay close to friends from every stage of her life. I called her in Los Angeles and asked, "How do you keep up with all your friendships? Do you have any rules for yourself, to make sure you keep those old ties strong?"

"Well," she answered thoughtfully, "one rule that's very helpful is to make some events nonnegotiable — which means, with some events, I'm going no matter what. They're too important to miss. Nothing can keep me from that wedding, or that milestone birthday party, or that reunion."

"Why is that so helpful?" I asked.

"If I know what's nonnegotiable," she told me, "I don't waste energy or time debating with myself about whether to put it on my calendar and buy the plane ticket. I know I'll go."

That's a valuable idea, especially for someone like me. I usually take weeks to make up my mind, and the mere back-and-forth is exhausting.

"Also," my sister says, "I've noticed that when I consider some things nonnegotiable, other people accept it. My husband, the people I work with — they don't argue with me. And when I tell my friends that I consider a certain event nonnegotiable, they're more likely to consider it nonnegotiable, too. And so more friends make the effort, and everyone gets the chance to see everyone else."

I think her rule is very helpful. But as I thought about my own relationships, I realized such opportunities didn't always arise, and sometimes years were going by between times I would see friends face-to-face. In those situations, I've found, technology is very useful. From time to time, I hear someone argue, "Technology is terrible for relationships. Instead of talking face-to-face, everyone's typing away in front of a screen, alone." I disagree. One of my Secrets of Adulthood is "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," and while chatting on Facebook certainly isn't as satisfying as meeting in person, it's still a valuable way to keep in touch.

In my experience, tech tools like Facebook and Twitter allow me to manage ties to a much larger group of people than I could possibly stay close to in a more direct way. Technology lets me effortlessly follow friends through many changes of e-mail and street addresses. It allows me to have brief, fun exchanges without expending a lot of time or energy. It gives me a quick way to reach out to friends and also a casual way to connect with people I don't know as well, whom I wouldn't feel comfortable calling or even e-mailing. And I'm not going to send a handwritten letter!

One example: Recently I had coffee with my friend Jane, whom I hadn't seen in many years. We first met when, for a year after college, I lived in San Francisco with my college roommate, who was dating a guy with a bunch of his own college friends, including Jane. We all spent a lot of time hanging out together.

I always liked Jane tremendously, but she wasn't one of my closest friends, and I lost track of her years ago. She told me, "You lose five people with every move" — true, in the old days! But technology has made staying in touch much easier. Indeed, Jane found me on Facebook, and we discovered that after all this time, we live just 13 blocks apart. Seeing Jane again gave me a wonderful happiness boost by reconnecting me to my past. The year I spent in San Francisco had been wonderful, but I'd almost forgotten it. Talking to Jane brought back a flood of memories and affection.

Nowadays, when I'm trying to decide how to spend my limited time, energy, and money, I often ask myself, Will this strengthen my relationships? Will this connect me to my past? I'm now far more likely to show up at parties, to send a quick "This made me think of you" note through cyberspace — or even just to revisit places in which I used to spend a lot of time.

A while back, I went to Washington, DC, to give a talk to my law school association. This trip made me happy for many reasons. I saw some of my blog-land pals from that area. I cruised around Washington, which is a beautiful city, especially when everything is blooming. Most of all, I loved being around a bunch of people from my law school. It was funny — I hadn't realized just how many references, interests, and inside jokes we shared. Sometimes it makes me sad that I've left behind my lawyerly identity — there were many things I enjoyed about that time. Staying connected to that part of my past makes me happy.

Have you found that reconnecting to your past boosts your happiness? How do you keep those relation-ships active and vital? E-mail me at gretchen@goodhousekeeping.com.

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